


Ordinary World

by I Am Your Spy (GroteskBurlesque)



Series: Ordinary World [1]
Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Illustrated, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-21
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 13:23:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1819990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GroteskBurlesque/pseuds/I%20Am%20Your%20Spy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Manhattan hesitates, Laurie goes to Jupiter, and Dan is left behind in a post-apocalyptic NYC to save Rorschach from himself. Gratuitous fix-it fic, with porn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hey, Jupiter

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this all the way back in 2008, just before The Movie, in dribs and drabs on the plus4chan message board. It, and its sequels, took over my life for a few years. I'm not proud, except that I kind of am.

Reality is not singular, is no more linear than time or space. At the bottom of the world, Dr. Manhattan, for all his power, is only offered glimpses of the possibilities, of the universes that branch out from his own, of the tiny decisions and accidents that change the course of the future. More accidents, he thinks, than decisions.  
  
In one reality, he never leaves Janey Slater’s watch in his lab coat, and the Vietnamese win the war.  
  
In one reality, it is the Soviets who acquire nuclear superiority. In another, the Islamic Caliphate rises to fill the void left by a Europe decimated by the bubonic plague. In another, Mithraism drives civilization and Christianity is buried beneath the dust of ancient history, and the people who live in the city that isn’t called New York wear golden bulls around their necks.  
  
In one reality, Heinz only has 57 varieties.  
  
He does not speculate on whether these realities are better or worse than his own. Human beings live and die, regardless. They die beneath mushroom clouds, beneath nightmare monsters, beneath towers struck by hijacked airplanes.  
  
A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. He only observes.  
  
In one reality, he and Rorschach face each other in the snow. Rorschach screams: “Do it.” He does. He feels nothing.  
  
But in this reality, he hesitates, because Laurie is calling him. Laurie who, in another universe, embraces Daniel, in this universe, can think only of the horror she has just witnessed.  
  
“Jon,” she says. She doesn’t need to shout over the raging wind. She’s quiet, but he hears her. “Jon, I can’t stand it. Get me out of here. Mars, fucking  _Jupiter_ , I don’t care. I want to leave.”  
  
In every reality where he is Dr. Manhattan, he leaves Earth. In this one, he turns from the man he should kill, and towards the woman he would have loved, had he been human. He doesn’t think that she loves him back. He isn’t sure that she ever did. But she doesn’t want to wake up tomorrow to a world where half of New York is dead, where she knows why, where she says nothing.  
  
He reaches for her.  
  
Dan is too late, always too late. Too late to understand what Dr. Manhattan’s sudden disappearance had meant, too late to stop Laurie from going with him. Thirty-five goddamned minutes too late.  
  
He shields his eyes from the burst of light as they dematerialize.  
  
When he opens them, everything is quiet. He doesn’t think it should be so quiet. He thinks there should be screaming.  
  
He meets Rorschach’s eyes—actual eyes, not inkblots—from across the snow. Wonders what the hell his ex-partner is still doing here, then decides he doesn’t care because, well, millions of New Yorkers are dead, and Hollis is dead, Adrian is a mass murderer, and Laurie is  _gone_ , and the only person in the entire world who he can ever talk to about it is standing in front of him.  
  
“Owlship—fixable?” Rorschach asks him.  
  
“God,” Dan says, “I hope so.”


	2. Mutually Assured Destruction

Two men in a washroom, one leaning the other over a mildewed bathtub. It isn’t what it looks like.  
  
One man is tall, stocky—pudgy, he’s secure enough to admit it to himself—and blond. He’d been growing a moustache, but the other man objected to it so strenuously that he’s now letting it grow into a stubbly beard, which itches his jaw. He hates it, but it’s a small annoyance in the greater scheme of things.  
  
As for the other man, the one bending into the tub, black streams from his scalp and runs into the yellowed tap water, splashing over the ceramic in random patterns, like inkblots. The blond man, Sam Hollis, according to his driver’s license and birth certificate, feels more than a little ill, thinking about it like that. Like he’s erasing everything that the other is, when really, what he should be grateful for is that there’s running water at all.  
  
Oh, and their lives. He should be grateful for their lives. It’s too easy to forget it sometimes, even when he looks through the cracks in the boarded-up windows at the apocalypse outside.  
  
The other man—and Dan has an easier time accepting the idea of Sam Hollis than he does of Victor Szadz, seriously, he wasn’t thinking  _at al_ _l_ when he came up with their emergency identities—wriggles free of his slippery grasp and sits up on the edge of the tub, dye still dripping over his forehead. Dan throws him a towel and he stares at it, draped over his hands, as though he’s not entirely sure of what to do with it.  
  
“Well?”  
  
Dan stifles the urge to laugh. There’s nothing to even smile at anymore, whatever the Comedian would have said. But he can’t help it. “You look ridiculous.”  
  
Rorschach stands, stiffly. Both of them are still bruised from the fight in Antarctica, and exhausted, barely sleeping on the way back to New York. It’s hard to remember sometimes that they’re both in their forties now, that their bodies don’t recover from beatings and sleep deprivation the way they used to.  
  
He stares over Rorschach’s shoulder into the mirror. His dye job isn’t as effective at disguising his identity as Dan’s is. It doesn’t match his complexion, for one thing; he looks paler and even more severe, and with the pictures after his arrest published all over the place, his narrow, ugly face is unmistakable.  
  
“What do you think?” Dan asks.  
  
He has a hard time reading the facial expressions of Rorschach-pretending-to-be-Kovacs-pretending-to-be-Szadz. The inkblots make more sense. “Another mask,” Rorschach says, resigned.  
  
  
  
After Antarctica, they had argued about what to do. No one who had survived the horror in New York will care very much about two vigilantes wanted for murder. Even assuming that anyone survived who could put them away, murder and jailbreaks, these days, were as trivial as mutually assured destruction. But Veidt won’t let them go so easily. He’d let them escape, Dan is sure of it because Veidt could have stopped them if he’d wanted to, but that doesn’t mean he won’t kill them if they breathe a word about where the monster actually came from. The only course of action that Dan and Rorschach can agree on is that, at least for the time being, Daniel Dreiberg and Walter Kovacs died in the city along with everyone else.  
  
Rorschach wants to keep fighting. He  _will_  keep fighting, for truth and justice, despite the costs, and if Dan doesn’t keep a lid on him, Veidt will kill him. Dan knows this, and it’s this close to breaking his heart, because the crazy little bastard is all he has left.  
  
It’s mutually assured destruction, after all.  
  
“You’ve got crap all over your face.” Dan grabs the towel from where it’s fallen on the floor and, when Rorschach just stands there, he wipes the dye from his ex-partner’s skin. Random black stains on white. It doesn’t mean anything. He sees Dr. Manhattan holding Laurie. He sees a nightmare of tentacles and blood. He’s not sure if he sees the man standing in front of him. “There. You still look like hell, though.”  
  
“Thank you,” Rorschach says, then: “Not joking.”  
  
“No, I know.” He clears his throat. “They’re asking for volunteers downtown. You know, digging out bodies, keeping an eye out for looters, that sort of thing. I was gonna go down there and help out.” Stupid, he knows, as soon as the words leave his mouth, stupid and pointless after they failed to save the world. Or failed to fail to save the world. Whichever one it was. But what else is left for them, now? There’s no room for heroes in Veidt’s utopia. Not their breed of hero, anyway. All they can do is clear away the rubble. “You, uh…”  
  
Rorschach brushes past him, out the bathroom door and into the apartment that’s been their hiding place for the past few days. He stands by a window overlooking the deserted street. Light floods in from gaps in the planks of wood that they nailed to the windowsill.  
  
“Will be another crime wave. Peace only lasts so long. Opportunities for criminals.”  
  
Dan takes that as a yes, and they leave together, to save the city again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amazing illustration for this chapter by jackiemei.


	3. Survivors

Dan would never say it out loud for fear of being dropped down an elevator shaft, but he has a fantasy that he keeps playing over and over in his mind.  
  
It’s a week and a half after the monster. Tentacles are still rotting in the street—disposal of the bodies was the first priority, respect for the dead and all that—and Dan and Rorschach wear particle masks to ward off the smell, two anonymous volunteers willing to take on the worst jobs. There’s a real spirit of brotherhood in New York; everyone wants to help. But most people would balk at sawing off pieces of tentacle to be carted away and burned. Rorschach, unsurprisingly, is good at that sort of thing.  
  
But Dan’s fantasy is this, that under one of the collapsed buildings, hiding in the wreckage of a car, whatever,  that there’s a trapped survivor. There aren’t any survivors. Had this been an earthquake, they’d have moved from search and rescue to salvage by now, and this is worse than an earthquake. The trapped victims that rescuers found at the beginning were gnawing on their own flesh, and most of them died shortly after.  
  
At night, though, Dan wishes they’d find one survivor, just one. He wishes that Rorschach would find one. In his head, it’s always a six-year-old girl, and after they return her to her parents, everything’s okay. Not just the monster, but both of them, hidden behind masks so long that it’s all but destroyed their minds.  
  
But all they ever find is more corpses.  
  
Nixon’s platitudes are comforting, as are Gorbachev’s. Even with the stench of death all around them, life continues. Aid trickles in from around the world. From Antarctica, Adrian Veidt holds benefit telethons. (Rorschach accidentally sees one of them while watching the black-and-white TV they’ve hooked up in the apartment. Dan, returning home after buying groceries, stumbles across the shattered television on the sidewalk, looks up at the window, and shakes his head.) A group of anarchists has set itself up by Ground Zero, handing out free vegan slop to volunteers and occasionally picketing the headquarters of the  _New Frontiersman_. Rorschach considers them a sinister element worthy of further investigation; Dan scoffs and secretly sort of agrees with their placards.  
  
The city is broken, but healing. Slowly, in its own despair and against its will, it finds its rhythm.  
  
They start patrolling at night again. Sometimes together, but that makes the memories all the more painful.  
  
One night, Dan comes across Rorschach beating the shit out of a top-knot. He’s vicious, always has been—the kid has long since gone slack under his fists but he doesn’t give up. Dan has to drag him away before he cracks the guy’s skull open.  
  
“Drug dealer,” Rorschach explains, as though it’s no big deal at all.  
  
“Are you insane? Are you  _trying_  to draw attention to yourself?”  
  
Rorschach blinks. All this time, and it’s still hard for Dan to get used to the fact that he has  _eyes_.  
  
“Can’t hide forever. Daniel.”  
  
Dan punches him. Hard. Hard enough to knock him into a dumpster, where he sprawls there, stunned, blood trickling out of one nostril. Dan is immediately overcome with shame—despite having no shortage of temptation or provocation, he’s never raised a hand against his friend, and he’s probably the only person in Rorschach’s life who hasn’t—and reaches out a hand to him.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m—”  
  
“Is nothing,” Rorschach says, even though it is. He climbs to his feet and starts down the alley and Dan, feeling particularly suicidal, grabs his arm.  
  
“Look, it’s just—we don’t know what Veidt is up to, if he even knows that we’re alive. We can’t go around acting like, like…”  
  
“Ourselves?”   
  
“We  _can’t_ ,” Dan says again, then mutters, “Oh, hell,” and kisses Rorschach.  
  
He expects to get punched himself for it, and thinks that he probably deserves to be, and oh dear God what was he even thinking, he’s gone crazy enough for the both of them. The other man—his only friend, who he still somehow always manages to betray, and now twice in one night—freezes, a deer caught in the headlights, and then slams him up against the dumpster and kisses him back.  
  
He’s pretty sure that Rorschach doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s probably—and it makes Dan ache to think about it—never even been hugged. He’s a terrible kisser, all teeth and saliva, but he won’t let Dan go. All of the rage of his interrupted rampage spurs him on. Dan tries to calm him down, running his hands through his ex-partner’s dyed hair, across his back, but it’s too late. Rorschach growls and bats his hands away. Dan’s unleashed whatever bright, terrible thing was lying dormant in him all this time. Too soon to tell whether he should regret it or not. He swallows the taste of copper, and he’s pretty sure that he’s never been so turned on in his entire life.  
  
Rorschach’s hand fumbles at the waistband of his jeans.  
  
“You don’t, um, have to…”  
  
“Hrrg.”  
  
“You don’t think this is going to make things weird?”  
  
Ice-chilled fingers grab his shaft, and tug at him roughly. He goes limp for a second and then looks down to see dark eyes in a face so pale that he is immediately reminded of black-on-white masks and he cries out. Rorschach bites his neck. It doesn’t take him very long to come—it’s been awhile—and when he reaches for Rorschach again, the other man shoves him away and won’t meet his eyes.  
  
It’s so cold. He wishes—and it’s sillier than wishing for survivors—that he had his old costume, that he could wrap both of them in wings and protect Rorschach from the world that broke him. As though that would help. He follows Rorschach down the alley, a few careful paces away, back to their apartment.  
  
When they try again, in the anonymity of a dark studio apartment on a single mattress, both of them are gentler, and he wants to cry at the wordless noises that Rorschach makes as he presses his face into the pillow.  
  
It’s not that it isn’t awkward, because trading messy, clumsy hand jobs with his ex-partner is about a hundred times more awkward than the first time he slept with Laurie. It’s just that things are strange and awful enough that he thinks that maybe Rorschach will forgive him for making it all a little stranger.  
  
“Rorschach?”  
  
“Mrrg?”  
  
“You still can’t go around beating people up. You’re not very subtle.”  
  
“Mrrg.”  
  
 _Well_ , Dan thinks,  _That wasn’t quite as bad a conversation as it might have been._  
  
“Just until Veidt—”  
  
“Never mind Veidt. Have plan.”  
  
Dan feels the bottom drop out of his stomach. “Plan?” he asks.  
  
“Kept journal of investigation into mask killer.”   
  
And then the words that mark his death, both of their deaths, maybe, but in any event, the end of all things:  
  
“Mailed it to the  _New Frontiersman_  before we left for Antarctica.”


	4. Fallout

> _“I like President Truman, the way Dad would of wanted me to. He dropped the atom bomb on Japan and saved millions of lives because if he hadn’t of, then there would of been a lot more war than there was and more people would of been killed.” – Walter Kovacs, age 11_

Dawn again. Rorschach is asleep, still wearing his rumpled clothes from the night before, belt unbuckled with his jeans half slipping off his hips. Dan props himself up on one elbow on the mattress beside him, not because he’s watching his ex-partner sleep. No, it’s because even though there’s no room for both of them to sleep comfortably and there’s another mattress three feet away, it’s a cold night and the heating’s busted again and okay, he doesn’t need to make any excuses—they’re both adults and if they want to destroy each other, well, it’s no one’s business but their own.  
  
And besides, sleeping is overrated these days. Who wants to sleep when the psychic residue of the monster is still giving everyone nightmares?  
  
He wonders what Rorschach dreams about.  
  
God, he hates the man sometimes. Not as much as he hates himself at the moment, though. What was he thinking? Rorschach wouldn’t have let last night happen if he’d been planning on living long enough to deal with the fallout. It wasn’t like he and Dan were going to end up picking out china patterns or something. Things like whatever the thing is between them never end well.   
  
He leans over and smoothes a stray curl from his friend’s face. Despite everything, it’s hard for Dan to hate him for very long.  
  
He leaves in the morning, before Rorschach wakes up, and catches the first post-curfew subway to Ground Zero. It’s half-empty; most of Manhattan is still closed for business, and the only people up at this hour are headed to reconstruction sites. Like he is.  
  
The anarchists are up early too, which surprises him a little, but maybe they didn’t sleep either. They huddle by their little stand, a pockmarked table that they dragged out of the wreckage of a public school, serving undifferentiated lentil goop that steams in the crisp winter air. Everyone has a plan for what New York will become when it awakens from its nightmare. Theirs is typed out neatly in bullet points, Xeroxed, and handed to passersby.  
  
He takes a flyer and hands them back a crumpled piece of paper.  
  


* * *

  
You wouldn’t expect it, given their radically different worldviews, but Dan and Rorschach never argued about politics all that often; maybe three times in the last decade or so. Once, near the end of their partnership, Dan found a copy of the _New Frontiersman_  in Archie’s bathroom and threw it out the window as they flew over the docklands.  
  
“Problem?” Rorschach had asked, looking up from the controls.  
  
“Well, yeah. I’m Jewish.”  
  
Rorschach had shrugged. “Nothing personal,” he’d said, and Dan didn’t talk to him for almost a week.  
  
The second time, it was about President Truman, who Rorschach still inexplicably idolizes, and Dan admits now that it was sort of cruel to make fun of him for that.  
  
The third time, if you could call it an argument, happened in Antarctica and was almost the same disagreement as the second, except that the destroyed city in question was New York and not Hiroshima. The irony isn’t lost on him, that they’re always on different sides about the calculated choice to kill many to save many more.  
  
Dan still doesn’t know the answer to that one. He sits outside what, in a better world, would have been the Gunga Diner, and watches his breath cloud and disintegrate. A woman’s shadow falls over him as she lays a wreath on one of the many impromptu memorials springing up across the city. He tells himself that Veidt has to be right because the alternative is even more depressing.  
  
Tonight, an explosion will take out Pioneer Press. It’s clearly the work of the not-as-harmless-as-they-look anarchist group that’s been making so much noise in front of the building lately. It’s likely to disrupt the fragile peace that has settled over New York since the monster; he not only imagines violent retaliation, but he expects it. No one should be working there, not that late, but then, they’re running up against a press deadline.  
  
He tells himself that he’s done it in the name of world peace, and if you look at it from that point of view, he’s not really betraying anyone at all.  
  


* * *

  
After the blast, he’s standing on the rooftop of his apartment. Electricity gets restored in fits and starts and it’s all very unpredictable, so on some clear nights you can actually look up in New York City and see the stars.  
  
He thinks the brightest star might be the planet Jupiter. In some other reality, it’s Laurie who’s standing there beside him, and he’s looking up at the night sky and wondering where Rorschach is.  
  
“Veidt no doubt has agents here. Explosion not a coincidence.”  
  
“Why do you think I want you to keep a low profile?” Dan breathes out a harsh sigh. “Come on, Rorschach. You don’t really think that Veidt’s working with a bunch of hippie anarchists, do you?”  
  
“Not paranoid. Investigating all possibilities.”  
  
“Can’t you just—” Dan starts, but no, he can’t just. Not ever. Already, Rorschach is planning some other scheme to take down Veidt. Of all the people to be left standing after Armageddon, Dan winds up with the guy who’ll wage a one-man Sisyphusian struggle as long as he lives, just on principle; someone who’ll never retire or be normal or live in the world on the world’s terms. The worst thing is this is what drew him to Rorschach in the first place and now he’ll always crave that.  
  
In another reality, Sam and Sandra Hollis are planning to visit Sally Jupiter at Christmas.   
  
In the reality where Heinz has 57 varieties, Dan is married and has two kids. That Daniel Dreiberg’s idea of a grand romantic gesture is roses and candlelight, not blowing up the office of a far-right newspaper to save the life of his erstwhile partner, who really wouldn’t appreciate it if he knew.  
  
“Look, about last night…”  
  
“No need to discuss. Work to do.”  
  
“But—”  
  
A gloved hand barely brushes over his fingers, just enough to blister in the cold. Rorschach doesn’t meet his eyes, but Dan’s okay with that. Used to it, even.  
  
“Said there was work to do,” and drops onto the fire escape, trenchcoat flapping.  
  
Dan smiles for the first time since Antarctica, and follows Rorschach down into the sleeping city.


	5. A Failure to Communicate

Dan doesn’t talk much these days, not even to his ex-ex-partner. In the quiet after the screaming, in the rubble that gave birth to Utopia, there’s so very little to talk about.  
  
He doesn’t mention the bodies that lie in black-shrouded rows in Times Square, dusted with snowflakes, the feel of a small hand in his palm as he deposits it softly, reverently, in a plastic bag. He doesn’t mention it because, what’s the point? Those murders have been solved, and all that remains is to bring them justice, and the three last masked adventurers on Planet Earth all know that it’s mostly Dan who stands in the way of  _that_.   
  
Accordingly, it’s just as pointless to ask Rorschach where he goes when he slips out the fire escape at night. Or to mention the tentative, feather-light touches that the two men exchange, late at night, when neither can see the other’s face. So they don’t say very much, two guys who’ve known each other for decades, communicating in single-word sentences and grunts.   
  
They go through three apartments in the first month. The first, they leave just after the explosion takes out Pioneer Press, which Rorschach is still convinced is the work of Veidt’s mysterious agents. The second is nicer, but some of the old tenants in the building want to come back and there’s the risk of getting sighted. By the third place, they’re back to cockroaches and inconsistent heat and only the occasional dribble of water (and more through the roof rather than out the tap) but it does have the advantage of being such a rotting hole that no one would ever pass the building by and imagine that even the most desperate homeless person could stand to live in it.  
  
When the world’s smartest man is looking over your shoulder, ready to add you to his impressive pile of corpses if you so much as  _breathe_  the wrong way, you can’t be too paranoid.  
  
It’s December, and the city has no place for them, not like it ever did. In another world, the massive Christmas tree in front of the Rockefeller Center sparkles with 78,000 lights. In their world, they’ve only just barely cleared away the debris. Dan never liked Christmas anyway, always felt awkward at the parties. He lies on the mattress and stares at the mottled grey-brown of the cracked ceiling, shadows dancing in the light of a helicopter.  
  
Rorschach stirs beside him. “Sleeping?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
Dan snorts, rolls over to face him. It’s as close to jumping his bones as Rorschach is ever going to get. There are rules, obviously, which Dan usually doesn’t figure out until he breaks one. No kissing, not after that first time. They’re not homosexuals, after all. No blowjobs. No eye contact. Even still, sometimes he’s too gentle and Rorschach flinches and turns away—usually at the worst possible moment—leaving Dan to deal with his uncomfortable arousal in the bathroom, irritated and hurt and wondering just what in hell was  _done_  to that guy.  
  
This? This is not one of those times.  
  
They don’t fit together properly. He’s used to the warm curves of a woman in his arms; Rorschach is all bony knees and elbows and sharp angles, and Dan thinks that this is right, that in the wreckage, nothing can be soft and loving and graceful ever again. He likes that the face that presses into his shoulder, scratching his skin with chipped teeth, is never the right one, is masked no matter what it looks like. He likes that it’s not  _comfortable_. He doesn’t want to be comfortable.  
  
He slams Rorschach into the mattress—he can feel his partner hit the floor underneath—climbs over him and feels him flail beneath, arms and legs that could incapacitate a criminal before he knew what was coming rendered suddenly clumsy. Dan bites freckled skin because he can’t be kind. He winces at the hiss of pain as he takes the smaller man, too roughly, too soon, not enough lubrication, but he’s not being pushed away and he’s too  _gone_  to really care anyway.  
  
 _Man_ , he thinks, in a split-second moment of lucidity before something inside him spasms and bursts,  _We’re kind of fucked-up._  
  
And somehow in all of this he manages to twist Rorschach over so that they’re face to face; he’s about to come, they probably both are, and he breaks one of those rules and stares into his partner’s ink-black eyes.  
  
It’s not like Rorschach has become less ugly or ill-tempered since Karnak, and he’s not about to redeemed by the love or, okay, maybe just the lust, of a good man. He’s not  _like_  that. It’s more that he’s exactly the same, violent and broken and it drives Dan insane but vulnerability is almost as much as a turn-on as a costume. Rorschach would probably kill him if he knew that.  
  
The abyss gazes back at him. Doesn’t understand it, understands so many things, but doesn’t get being wanted. Doesn’t think such things are possible.  
  
But for a moment there’s something there, and Dan strokes the side of his face, notices the roots beneath the faded dark curls. It’s almost tender, and then Rorschach jerks away from him and curls up facing the wall.  
  
Dan drifts off for a few hours, and when he wakes up, the apartment is filled with the cold blue light of dawn. He’s alone. He curses under his breath and stares at the indent in the mattress beside him, rolls over and stares at the cracked ceiling, and then, too late like goddamned  _always_ , notices the headline on yesterday’s  _Gazette_ , crumpled with the past week’s newspapers on the floor.  
  
You’d think the appearance of a washed-up retired superhero wouldn’t be front-page news in a city flattened by an alien monster only a month earlier. But this is Utopia, after all, and the rules are different. When something nice happens, like the return of said retired superhero for a benefit performance in Times Square to boost the spirits of the survivors and raise money for the reconstruction effort—well. It’s a different world, now, even for journalists. A more loving world.  
  
Dan’s fist goes into the wall and flecks of plaster, like snowflakes, like ashes, flutter around his head.  
  


* * *

 

> _“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” – attributed to Joseph Stalin_

 

For five weeks, Broadway and Seventh has been a graveyard, the heart of the city turned still and cold. It’s appropriate, Dan thinks, and equally appropriate that they’ve moved the salvage site somewhere more convenient and hidden, clearing out all the corpses in less than 24 hours. It’s amazing what you can do with enough money and the proper incentives.  Adrien Veidt, the great Ozymandias, pities New York. His heart bleeds for it, just like his heart bleeds for every other savaged and starving part of the world, but God forbid that he should be brought face-to-face with the visceral, stinking afterbirth of his creation.   
  
Dan pulls up the floorboard by the bathroom, reaches down into the dust and retrieves his goggles. The other mask, that’s gone of course, and the fedora, and the awful smelling trenchcoat with the bloodstain. He should have made Rorschach throw them out in exchange for shaving off his mustache.  
  
He laughs at that thought—as though he could ever possibly make Rorschach do anything.  _Especially_  that. He might be wearing a mask on top of a mask, but Dan never kids himself that he’s doing anything other than biding time underneath.   
  
Last night was a goodbye. Rorschach was trying to be  _nice_.  
  
Dan sits there for a long time, flipping the goggles over and over in his hands. By daylight, they’re ridiculous, incapable of saving anything, or anyone. He checks the time in the paper again.  
  
Part of him—and he doesn’t like this part, he tries to smother it but it whispers to him anyway—wants to stand by and do nothing. Let the truth win out, let Rorschach do whatever horrible thing he has planned. People will die, and there’s already been so much death that the prospect of more killing seems unreal to him. How can it matter? How can more bodies tip Utopia’s precarious balance and send the world hurtling back into war and misery?  
  
Except that he knows he can’t do nothing, and it’s not because of any promise he made to Veidt. It’s not—and this is what he hates the most—even really about saving the world anymore.  
  
Downtown, they’re setting up a stage. It’s impressive. In ancient Egypt, it’d have taken hundreds of slaves to raise those pyramids, to string highwires between buildings, to stand guard around an assembling crowd to protect the coming Pharaoh and clear his path. Here, it takes only dozens of volunteers, eager to do anything that isn’t digging out bodies and glistening slabs of alien meat.  
  
Today, the city hums with electricity. Veidt has reached into its squelching despair and given it a sense of purpose. Watching from a rooftop, Dan can’t remember the last time he saw so many people out on the streets. He blinks, like he’s stepping out from a cave into a circus of neon violet and acid green. The city puts on a new face for its savior.   
  
  
[](http://es.tinypic.com/)  
  
  
There’s no way to find Rorschach, not in this mess, and especially not if he doesn’t want to be found. And Dan doesn’t know what he’d do even if he did manage to find him. It’s not as though Dan is going to be able to talk him out of it.  
  
Like the gears of the massive clock that looms above him, the events of the day, set in motion long before this moment, slide into place. It’s easy to think that he had no role in this. It’s always been someone else’s plans—Veidt’s plans, Rorschach’s plans, Nixon’s or Gorbachev’s or Keene’s or some faceless bureaucrat’s, bent over a map in a war room somewhere. Never Dan’s. He’s too preoccupied, too concerned with the human, the mundane, one life against the lives of countless others.  
  
He breathes in, the air cold in his lungs. It smells, not of blood and ash, not of Nostalgia, but of Millennium. He slips down a rusting staircase, into familiar shadows. He passes an old woman who offers to tell his fortune and he ignores her but on the table he can see tarot cards, the Tower and the Hanged Man. There was never a chance that he could stand in the way of fate, and never a chance that he wasn’t going to try anyway.  
  
The thing is, Dan thinks as his arm curls around the throat of one of Veidt’s security guards, peace tends to result in a certain sense of complacency.  In a world purged of sin, you don’t see the snake in the garden because you’re not really expecting to see one. Who wants to tamper with perfection like this?  
  
The man chokes and gags and goes unconscious and, in a fit of self-deprecation, Dan wonders why he ever bothered with the whole masked adventurer routine in the first place. There are easier disguises that one can find in which to fight evil.  
  
Dressed in another man’s skin, the weight of a gun against his hip, Dan puts on his best pleasant smile and steps into the light.  
  


* * *

  
Crowds trust a man in a uniform. It renders Dan anonymous, even if he hasn’t brushed his teeth in days, even if his skin is grimy and his eyes hollow. They are still reassured. He assumes the role easily—the city’s protector. He thinks he might be that much, even now. He pushes forward and people step aside for him. He is someone important.  
  
It’s hard to strike the right note of solemnity and resolve, but Veidt tries admirably. There are no pyrotechnics when people cringe in fear of explosions. Veidt enters to red and blue spotlights that cross over his flawless features and beam up to the sky in defiance, to Gershwin’s  _Rhapsody_  and a round of applause. He swings effortlessly from the highwires and his acrobatics somehow manage a sense of gravitas. This is Man, perfected, even in the ruins, the spirit of progress and hope.  
  
As he watches, Dan sort of still wants to believe in him.  
  
This is where his plan falls apart. As Veidt lands with a flourish, arms extended to the brave people of New York City, there’s still no sign of Rorschach. Even as Veidt addresses the crowd, head half-bowed but proud nevertheless, as he asks the world to pray for the shattered city, for a nation and a world that grieves for its lost children, as he reassures those who go on with their lives, who stand strong in their resolve for justice and peace, Dan scans the faces in the crowd and sees nothing.  
  
Beside him, a young man wraps his arms around his girlfriend; a father lifts his daughter onto his shoulders to watch the spectacle.  
  
The music resumes. Veidt springs into the air, dances above Times Square, in the spaces between buildings and the beams of the spotlights. Dan is so entranced that it’s some time before he notices the other figure, lithe and dark, that echoes Veidt’s leaps and falls. It could be Veidt’s shadow against the giant clock, invisible in the brightness of the Sun God.  
  
Dan just thinks: _Oh. Fuck. No._  
  


* * *

  
Veidt has no doubt noticed that he’s no longer alone above the city, his hyperaware senses picking up on the stresses and tensions in the wires even before he sees Rorschach fly at him. He blocks the punch, and he’s almost fast enough to knock his attacker clean of the highwires, except that the one thing that the world’s smartest man can’t see coming is the world’s stupidest ambush. The smaller man barrels into him and he catches his grip on another wire, thrown off balance, bringing his knees up in a swift kick.  
  
Even from where he stands, helpless below the stage, Dan sees the inkblots coalesce into a shape that looks like broad grin. Rorschach has been waiting a long time for this.  
  
The couple standing near him both gasp; he exchanges a glance with another security guard a few yards away. No one knows if this is part of the show or not—if it is, it’s in  _very_  poor taste and why wouldn’t Veidt  _inform_  anyone if he was planning a stunt like this—still, they’re almost coordinated enough, each man narrowly dodging the other’s blows as they chase up and down the wires like cats above an alley, that it looks choreographed.  
  
Dan swallows past a lump in his throat. Rorschach is amazing, feral and snarling and almost beautiful like this, silhouetted in crimson and absolutely relentless. But he isn’t a match for Veidt any more than both of them, together, were in Antarctica. Dan edges closer to the stage, reaches for his gun. He sees the other guard do the same thing, arm wavering. Both of the fighters are too close, too fast, and there are too many innocent civilians around for an ordinary mortal to get a clear shot.  
  
There’s nothing he can do except watch, paralyzed and transfixed.  
  
One of the wires pops free, then another, cut by an unseen knife, and Veidt swings across the stage, skimming the head of a golden sphinx. Rorschach grabs him and hauls him over a tangle of broken wires, coils around him with a penknife at his throat and hisses into the microphone on his lapel.  
  
“Tell them, Veidt. Tell them what you did.”  
  
In the hush before Dan hears the shot ring out, before the splash of blood on spandex, they hang together, suspended above the stage in a demented spider’s web of crisscrossed wires, a parody of a lover’s embrace. Hiroshima’s shadows, sketched in red spotlights, cast onto the motionless city as it holds its breath.   
  
They stay like that, for seconds, forever, until one of Veidt’s security guards realizes that he has a clear line of sight. Rorschach slides against Veidt’s chest and they both plummet downwards, caught up in severed wires, framed in red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amazingpic by amazing badra1018.


	6. Détente

Dan reaches the edge of the riser, panting, shaking like a dope fiend. Over the floor of the stage he can look up, even though he doesn’t want to, and sees the slow swing of the two entangled forms, trapped in the web and each other’s death grip. With considerable effort, Veidt manages to extract himself, squeezing past the cables wrapped around his body to balance precariously on the intact wire above. He reaches down and, without hesitation or mercy, rips off the inkblot mask. Even as close as Dan is, all he can see is a mass of dark hair and a bloody face. It’s all anyone can see.  
  
“It’s not  _him_ ,” Veidt says, quietly, but the mic is still on, so of course everyone else can hear too. “Not Kovacs, I mean. It’s some other crazy with a mask. Get him out of here.”  
  
Dan freezes—what exactly is Veidt playing at?—and then, even though he knows he’s probably going to die for it, climbs over the stage. It’s not as though he has anything to lose now. He puts his hand out to stop the guard behind him. He’s in charge. No one knows him, but he’s in a uniform and he’s giving out orders so he’s clearly in command. He doesn’t meet Veidt’s eyes; just hauls himself up into the nets and across the wires to where Rorschach hangs, arms still draped across the cables.  
  
“It’s okay, sir.” He doesn’t think that he can disguise the tremor in his voice, thinks that Veidt  _must_  hear it, must recognize him, but out of the corner of his eyes, he sees the man nod. “We’ll take it from here.”  
  
Veidt thanks him, ever so polite, and lands, light as a cat, at the front of the stage. Dan can hear him talking again, blathering on about the enemies of peace and freedom. Dan doesn’t care. Blood pulses in his ears as he catches his motionless partner.  
  
Someone is muttering, “please don’t be dead, you stupid asshole,” and Dan realizes that it’s him. He bites his lip and touches his partner’s pale neck, there’s heat there, and a fluttering pulse, and he can barely see through the tears blurring his vision.  
  
“Goddamn it, Rorschach.”  
  
Rorschach’s dark eyes slide open and take a moment to focus on his face. “Hold me.”  
  
Dan wraps him in a gentle hug, wary of the liquid heat that bubbles over his hands, of causing his injured friend any more pain.  
  
“Hell of a time to get romantic.” Not like he isn’t so terribly, terribly grateful.  
  
Rorschach grunts out: “Hurm. No. Mean it literally.” In a swift series of motions, he grabs Dan’s gun, fires into the cable above their heads, and they’re yanked up into the air again as it snaps. Dan clings to his partner for dear life as they swing high above the crowd and smash through the window of an office building overlooking the square.  
  


* * *

  
For a moment he’s sprawled there, bruised and bleeding, Rorschach a dead weight against his chest. The back of his trenchcoat is slick with blood. The thick canvas probably slowed the bullet at least a bit, and it wasn’t at close range, but God, he’s not moving and his breath comes in pained wheezes and Dan is gripped by terror again as he rolls his partner onto his side, wads up his jacket and presses it against the wound. Outside, he hears sirens rising to a wail.  
  
“What were you  _thinking_?”  
  
Rorschach coughs. “Got out. Good plan.”  
  
“No, that was a  _bad_  plan. Probably the worst plan ever, which is saying a lot. You could have been killed.”  
  
Rorschach struggles weakly under his hands, trying to get up. Dan keeps him pinned down against the grey industrial carpet. “Wasn’t.”  
  
“I might not have been there. I might not even have figured it out in time…”  
  
His partner’s eyes slide shut again, and Dan shakes him, tries to keep him awake. He murmurs something and then says, “You did. Always do.”  
  
There’s something in his voice that rattles Dan, some ghost of expression, a relic of a man who died a decade earlier. He’s imagining it, probably. Kovacs doesn’t exist, but for a while, the man who replaced him lets his mask slip a little, lets himself be held. The red curls at the back of his neck tremble with each of Dan’s breaths. He’s tiring quickly, and Dan starts thinking about escape routes, hospitals, safe houses, and how he’s ever going to set up new identities for them, assuming that they survive the night. The cops will be on them soon. He feels them closing in, red and blue gleaming through the splintered glass of the window.  
  
“Rorschach. We have to go.”  
  
“Mffg.” He manages to pull himself up, leaning heavily on Dan, groggy with blood loss. “The  _New Frontiersman_?” he asks suddenly.  
  
It’s not really the conversation that Dan wants to have right now, but if it keeps his partner conscious and fighting… “How long have you known?”  
  
“Veidt didn’t know about journal. Had no motive. You did.”  
  
“Oh.” He feels like an idiot. “It wasn’t to protect  _him_.”  
  
“Still. Wrong.”  
  
“Yeah,” Dan says. “You can punish me for it later if that gives you a reason to hang on.” He slings Rorschach’s good arm around his shoulders and half-carries, half-drags him across the floor.  
  
“Will do that,” Rorschach mutters, and Dan isn’t entirely sure that he’s kidding.


	7. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everyone criticizes Dan's decorating sense, and I reveal myself to be a shameless ball of mush.

This latest apartment used to belong to an art dealer. He must be dead now, or too scared to return. Rorschach hates the place, both for its conspicuousness and its all-too-modern, minimalist décor (he’s partial to the abstract expressionist painting in the living room, though), but he doesn’t really get a say in the matter, and the filthy places they’d been hiding in before are breeding grounds for infection.  
  
Dan chose it because of the view. You can see all off the red brick buildings down Wooster St., the latticework of balconies and staircases. When the sun comes in through the bedroom window, the stark designer white of the carpet and walls glow so brightly that it hurts your eyes. SoHo is emptier than it should be, and it feels like the beginning of the world.  
  
But now it’s night. He sits on the bed, adjusting the covers over his partner’s shoulders, listening to the drunken revelers outside. The spirit of Bohemia has revived here, in the monster’s wake, and they celebrate in the bars and cafés, stagger into the streets arm-in-arm, singing, laughing, because they aren’t dead.  
  
“Decadence,” Rorschach grumbles. “Plague on society.”  
  
“Mmm hmm.”  
  
“You like it.”  
  
“So do you.” He doesn’t, but his condition has improved enough that Dan thinks it’s probably safe to tease him a bit. He understands why strangers sit on the curb trading swigs from wine bottles and stumble off to fuck in alleyways. He gets it. He’s never been so in love with being alive. He’s just about to climb into bed when he feels Rorschach tense up. “What is it? Are you in pain?”  
  
“Heard something.”  
  
“It’s just the drunks outside.” But Rorschach, even drugged to the gills on morphine, is still usually right about these things, so Dan grabs the crowbar under the bed and whispers, “If you so much as get off this bed, I’ll punch you.”  
  
He opens the bedroom door, just a crack, sighs and slams his head into the doorframe. He drops the crowbar—it’s not like it’s going to be any use—and steals out into the living room.  
  
Adrian Veidt glances up from the five-thousand-dollar, utterly uncomfortable sofa. “Hello, Daniel. You’re looking good—other than the hair, of course. Have you lost weight?”  
  
Dan groans and slouches against the exposed brick wall. He’s done some questionable things in his life, but not nearly enough to deserve the karmic payback of having vigilantes and mass murderers break into his home on a regular basis. “I need to buy a better lock.”  
  
Veidt grins, his teeth white in the shadows. “It wouldn’t have made a difference.”  
  
“Why are you here, Adrian?”  
  
“Consider it a professional courtesy. Keep your attack dog on a shorter leash, or I’ll put him down.”  
  
Dan wishes he hadn’t dropped the crowbar. It takes all of the effort he can muster to not just lunge across the room and throttle Veidt with his bare hands. Instead, he just stands there, shaking, impotent. “You  _touch_  him, and I’ll—”  
  
Veidt raises a hand. “Relax, Dan. If I’d wanted him dead, I’ve had plenty of opportunities. More than you realize. As long as he’s just an unhinged nutcase, it’s all the same to me. But don’t think that his life means anything to me, measured against every other life on this planet.” He bends forward, legs crossed, like he’s at a stockholder’s meeting. “Do we have an understanding?”  
  
“We’ve always had an understanding.”  
  
“Good, good.” Veidt looks genuinely pleased. “Nice apartment, by the way. I wouldn’t think that it was your taste, though. Very stark, very formalist.”  
  
“Thank you. I think.”  
  
Veidt stands up, nods perfunctorily. He moves as if to leave, then stops abruptly. “You know, I figured out Rorschach years ago. No one who dresses like that could possibly be—well, it was obvious, even if  _he_  had no idea. But  _you_?”  
  
“I’m not,” Dan starts to say, but he doesn’t because it’s one thing to be outmaneuvered by a superhero-turned-supervillain but quite another to have Veidt completely laugh in his face.   
  
“One of these days,” Veidt says, and his tone is warm, almost sympathetic. Dan rages silently; he isn’t one of those broken things that Veidt needs to feel sorry for. “It won’t be a question of loyalty to him or to me. It’ll be his life, or the world.”   
  
“I know,” Dan says hoarsely. “Best of luck building Utopia, Adrian,” and he almost means it, almost hopes that Veidt will wish him the best of luck  _living_  in it.  
  
Veidt leaves as quietly as he came, and Dan retreats back to the bedroom, to his shattered, defeated friend and the play of moonlight and shadows across the walls. He leans his forehead against Rorschach’s, feels the other man’s breath hot and ragged against his cheek. It isn’t perfect or even really right, he thinks, and they’re both as scarred and bent as the ruins of Ground Zero.   
  
But he can still take some small joy in this. It’s midnight, and they’re alive, and below the window, the city sings them to sleep.


End file.
